


Tomorrow is a Mystery

by Allekha



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Cultural Differences, Gen, Post-Canon, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 22:17:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7286788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/pseuds/Allekha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gillian Taylor gets used to the new present: the changes in the city and society, the future that is now history, and a few happy whales.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tomorrow is a Mystery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lah_mrh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lah_mrh/gifts).



The future is another country.

It's not _as_ bad of a transition as it could have been. There is apparently a procedure for this; someone helps Gillian set up an identity and gives her a very, very, _very_ basic introduction to how to use the computers and some kind of computer network, but mostly, she is stuck figuring things out on her own. It helps that the language is the same, with a few tweaks to the grammar and an avalanche of new words to learn.

At first, there is the trial to distract her, when she isn't telling the future-biologists everything she knows about whales. They have questions on questions, and she wishes sometimes that the starship couldn't have spared a few moments to let her pick up some of her library before they left for the future, but her excellent memory holds. She is relieved to hear that the scientists still have genetic samples from other humpback whales, and the technology clone them and make a viable breeding population. One of them explains, showing her charts she can't understand, how some of the samples have deteriorated but that with the good DNA from Gracie and George and their baby, they'll be able to restore those with no errors. And now those resulting clones will have other whales to learn from, role models to teach them how to breathe and hunt and sing.

Gillian would have thought they would be more excited about this aspect of the project, but another scientist tells her that this isn't the first revivalism project she's taken part in. She rattles off the names of a half-dozen species that Gillian's never heard of. "First time it's ever saved the Earth, though," she muses at the end.

They adore the whales, though. When they take a ship out to check on them, everyone rushes to the railing to watch the whales breaching and tail-slapping. Gillian talks to them in-between explaining what's happening. She doesn't know how much the two of them understand, but Spock said that they were fond of her, so they must get something out of it.

The excitement only increases further when the calf is born. They watch it live on televisions nearly as big as movie theater screens, set into the walls of the boat, the footage transmitted from tiny submersibles that won't disturb the whales. It's just like being there in the water, except that the view is even better and it's all being recorded as they watch.

It's amazing. Sci-fi movies have never had anything on this.

When the first few days of the calf's life have passed (quietly, and without incident), her supervisor tells her to take some time off and get up to speed on the state of the world and its technology. Gillian doesn't want to leave the whales, but it's true that she can still barely use the computers, and she doesn't know how to use the network very well. She won't be able to work properly without those things, and she's had more than a few awkward conversations with her co-workers stemming from her ignorance of this new society.

So she agrees, and sets herself to learning as fast as possible so she can return to her whales.

~!~

Gillian starts with the city. This San Francisco is in many ways the same as the one she left behind. The vibe feels similar, and the famous bridge is still there and still plastered over every bit of tourist merchandise.

The skyline is so different, though. Buildings reach taller than she ever could have imagined. Cars fly over her head. Roofs often have a garden on them, lending splashes of green here and there. The streets have changed in some places, perhaps the result of earthquakes. The ethnic enclaves are either completely different or just plain don't exist any more; Gillian can't quite figure it out. On the plus side, there are now all kinds of new restaurants to choose from – never mind different countries, she can eat cuisine from different _planets_ , though nothing is quite as comforting as good old Italian.

And computers have soaked into _everything_. They're at the tourist destinations, offering up multitudes of information for those not with a guide. They're in the stores, taking the place of cashiers in all but the smallest of shops, like the antiques place she steps into out of curiosity. They take her orders in restaurants, though real people bring the food to her. They're in the taxis, and presumably every other car – there's not even a steering wheel in these vehicles.

After a few weeks have passed, she's so well-adjusted she almost surprises herself. When she gets into an air-taxi, she doesn't reach for the steering wheel, just pulls out her tablet to poke around on it. When she goes shopping for groceries – there are machines that make meals, now, but sometimes she wants food that tastes a little more authentic – she doesn't stand around looking for where to check out, but breezes out the door like everyone else as the computers make little clicking noises above her.

She's sure that everyone else doesn't take a little thrill every time they do that, though.

~!~

Gillian has never been very interested in history – except when it came to that of living things, the fascinating evolutionary history of beings like humans and whales – but she has three hundred years to catch up on.

Some of it turns out to be, quite frankly, horrifying. She's heard of genetically-enhanced humans, the Augments, but she never would have thought that their existence would lead to war. And weren't two world wars enough for one species? Not to mention the massive carelessness with regard to the environment – it's not just the oceans and the whales. No wonder her co-worker has done so many of these species revival projects if this is what Earth is trying to bounce back from.

She probably would have lived through some of this, she realizes. The Eugenics Wars were only six years away. World War Three was close on its heels.

She finds her bright spots in the later accounts of increased peacefulness, the contact with alien civilizations, the new thrust of anti-pollution laws and conservation efforts. The lack of currency is still a very strange idea, but she has seen how it works, and given what lead to it, now she can understand the why behind it even if she isn't sure she agrees yet.

More interesting for her, and far less depressing, are the enormous advances in science. They know so much more now about genetics and this new thing called epigenetics, how immune systems and brains function. The ocean was always more of a blind spot than space – they had better maps of Mars than of the sea – but new vehicles and tech have changed that. Gillian spends an afternoon in a cafe just looking at pictures of the strange and wonderful world of deep-sea creatures.

There are still mysteries, of course. The damage to the global ecosystem still affects the survivors, and they have better information on animals and plants from other planets than some of their own species.

It's all so much that she can't hope to take it in at once. She focuses on the topics most relevant to her, looking up new words all the time, and tries to draw connections where she can. Thank God for her memory, or else she'd have to interrupt herself even more often to try and reconstruct the same new concepts all the time.

When she tires of the reading, she takes walks out around the city. She ducks into new places to try the food, or heads to the beach or park and finds a place to lay back and think. Huge whales that subsist on tiny shrimp and transparent creatures that glow in the dark of the bottom of the sea; tiny mutations that lead to disaster and traumatic experiences that can even affect the genes of grandchildren. These things flow together in her mind, and oh, wow, isn't it great to have all of this information literally in her hands? She's better at using the network now, and any time she wants to she can grab the screen from her pocket and bring up the whole of humanity's knowledge.

More than that. The knowledge of humanity and its allies and even some from their enemies. Hell, it's hard to imagine now how anyone lived without it. When she wants to find a place to sit and read, she just asks a pocket computer and gets instant recommendations and directions. When she wants to know the weather, she doesn't have to hunt down a newspaper. When she doesn't know something, she just says, "What does it mean, silicon-based life?" and articles appear out of nowhere.

No more hunting through card catalogs and old journal archives. The people of the future don't know how good they have it.

~!~

Kirk remembers to send her a message asking how she's doing. It takes her a good chunk of her evening to figure out how to answer him. She doesn't want to just gush about all the new things that are completely normal to him, or tell him how disappointed she is in the state of the environment that he did nothing to bring about.

She tells him that George and Gracie's calf is good and healthy, and that though people joking suggested calling it Gillian after her, they decided on Gabby instead. She writes about how things are moving along to get other new calves born from artificial wombs so that Gabby will have her own mate someday. In the end, she includes a few lines about how she's been learning a lot before she signs off with well-wishes for him and Spock and the rest of the crew.

She goes back to work, this time better-equipped to handle the computers. The people, too. Society sure has changed, almost universally for the better. Gillian suspects that it would be a lot less likely now for anyone to do something like tell her the wrong time for her beloved whales to be moved to the ocean. Her blood still boils at the memory. 'Easier' on her? Who the hell did Bob think he was fooling? As if she was just some damn emotional woman who wouldn't be able to container herself and put on a professional front.

Anyway, the whales are here, in the open ocean, and they are safe for the rest of their lives.

San Francisco has only gotten more diverse, and Gillian is pleased to find herself not only working with a nearly even mixture of men and women (and others? She still hasn't quite figured out what that is about), but with people from every corner of the globe and even the occasional alien. Africa has developed nations, now. India isn't made of poverty. Eastern Europe is no longer locked away with the Soviet Union. And now all of them can work together to try and undo humanity's mess.

Gillian picks up the new way speech rapidly, even tones down her cursing a bit (out loud – she can be as filthy in her own head as she damn well pleases). Sometimes the idioms don't translate – she had to explain "Penny for your thoughts" once – but people are so amused by "best thing since sliced bread" that it starts to circulate amongst her co-workers.

One of them has just used it, in fact, to describe some of their data, when he gets a call. He glances at the screen and says, "Oh, hold a moment, it's from my boyfriend," and ducks out into the hallway.

Gillian wonders if that's new slang, except that when she starts looking at other people and not the buildings or her screen, she sees men holding hands with men and women kissing women. A quick search of the network reveals that it's not just San Francisco. People can marry people of any gender, and there just... it doesn't seem to matter. Nobody loses their jobs over this, or their public prestige. It's just a fact of life that happened between when Gillian left and when she arrived.

All of it put together is enough to put her head spinning. She does what she has always done and doubles down on her work – monitoring George and Gracie and Gabby, looking after their habitat, writing up everything she can about humpback whales for both scientific and public consumption. There is new software she has to learn, which she takes one program at a time, and people who want to talk with her, mostly about the whales but also historians looking for an eyewitness into a time long past.

She marries herself to her job, and it's fine – she likes it, her work and her co-workers and the ocean and the public – except three years later when everything is less shiny and new, she meets a nice woman from Indonesia at a conference. They stay up half the night talking about whales and fish and sea jellies, then message back and forth for months. The topics slip from research to griping about the realities of life on a floating research station – even future tech can't compensate for everything – to normal things. Food. The news. Gillian sends her pictures from her adventures around the new San Francisco and is treated to photographs of the woman's favorite haunts.

The next time they meet, at a different conference near Jupiter – Jupiter! And it's so easy to get there, just buy a ticket and head out – Gillian doesn't even need wine in her system to kiss her. The common sense that grew up in a different time protests, but is overwhelmed but the common sense she's cultivated in the here and now, where she can teleconference with people from East Africa while she's eating a computer-made breakfast from Nepal and checking the news from five planets on a different screen.

Their work means they don't get to see each other in person that much, but as long as they can juggle the time differences, Gillian is sure they'll work it out. There are a lot of things that one can do with video chat, after all, and they can message whenever they want to. She had worse communication with her first roommate in college.

There will still, probably, for a long time if not forever, be a part of her mind that boggles at everything. That she can ask a handheld for directions to the nearest Italian place and it will call her a driverless cab while it's at it. That space shuttles come and go so frequently over the city that the locals never bother to look up unless one is particularly screechy, and then only to scowl. That she can walk down the street holding a woman's hand and it's not just safe, it's just normal.

The rest of her is welcoming this new time as fast as it can. There are a dozen humpbacks, now; in a few years, when Gabby and the oldest of the males start reaching maturity, they should have no problems re-establishing themselves as a species. The city is a vibrant, welcoming place. There is so much information at her fingertips she is sick of it, and still people beg her for updates on the whales.

She writes Kirk and tells him, first, about the whales – how else would she open a letter to him – and after replying to some things in his last message, mentions the strange moments that still occasionally pierce her general acceptance. She thinks that she will amuse him, but his reply is surprisingly thoughtful. He may not have been permanently displaced in time, but it seems that he, too, has had to adapt himself to strange cultures with strange habits, find understanding if not acceptance of alien customs.

When she is done reading it, she reads it again. Her handheld beeps with a message from her girlfriend, and then with an alarm telling her she needs to go to work. Gillian scrambles a little for her supplies before rushing out. Today she is giving a group of schoolchildren a tour and introduction to the whales. It will be quite different from the speeches she used to give at the Cetacean Institute, but she knows the children will smile and gasp the same when the whales come up to breech.


End file.
